Pages

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Today's Internets - "I'm a simple man..."

"A federal judge ruled Monday that the New York Police Department violated the civil rights of New Yorkers with its broad "stop-and-frisk" policy, in a blow to the Bloomberg administration...

"The city's highest officials have turned a blind eye to the evidence that officers are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner," she wrote. "In their zeal to defend a policy that they believe to be effective, they have willfully ignored overwhelming proof that the policy of targeting "the right people" is racially discriminatory."

Police brass received warnings since at least 1999 that officers were violating rights, she said. "Despite this notice, they deliberately maintained and even escalated policies and practices that predictably resulted in even more widespread Fourth Amendment violations," she wrote in a lengthy opinion. She also cited violations of the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure."

"The revelations revolve around Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, whose wording contains enough ambiguity that the Agency has been able to interpret it as giving them authority to spy on Americans and people in America."

"If I put this in a novel, people would say no way, it's too brazen, too bullshit, it could never happen. But: the "review" Obama says he wants of NSA activities? He's going to have it run by James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence (to whom the NSA reports), the guy who lied to Congress about what the NSA is doing. So... the NSA will be functionally reviewing itself, with the head of the review someone with a proven history of lying to Congress about the NSA...

As I said elsewhere: "Shorter Obama: the NSA will go on fucking America's ass. But we will consider using some lubricant.""

"The SWAT Team then went to the property on Mansfield Cardinal Road one day later to execute the warrant around 7:30 a.m. They found nothing. You would think that would be the end of it. But no. The SWAT team was followed by a bunch of code enforcement officers who took care of the real demon weeds: sunflowers, blackberry bushes and okra...

The city says the farm has code enforcement violations they refused to fix. So, SWAT team!"

"...their major forms of opposition—declining to expand state-based Medicaid programs, refusing to build state-run health care exchanges, saying mean things about the law—are all perfectly legal. This is true even if you think they are not serving the public, are not behaving with dignity, or are simply very bad people. The law, in combination with the Supreme Court’s Medicaid ruling last summer, gives Republican governors the ability to opt out of creating their own exchanges, and allows them to keep their current Medicaid programs without fear of penalty...

It is the Obama administration which has chosen to ignore the law of the land by selectively enforcing provisions, encouraging government agencies and ignoring clear legislative language that conflicts with the administration’s goals. The administration’s delay of the employer mandate, for example, is not supported by statute. And when questioned about his administration’s authority to enact the delay, Obama has not even tried to claim that it is; instead he has simply asserted the authority to delay the provision, and then returned to criticizing Republican opposition. When Republicans in the House voted to give Obama explicit authority to delay the provision, and to delay the individual mandate as well, he issued a veto threat...

In response to a provision in the law requiring congressional legislators and their staffers to buy insurance through the law’s exchanges, meanwhile, President Obama personally lobbied the Office of Personnel Management to rule that those employees could use their federal employer health benefit contributions toward the purchase of exchange-based coverage. But OPM has no authority to fund coverage not contracted through the federal benefits program. And then there is the matter of the law’s insurance subsidies. The text of the law states only that these subsidies are available in exchanges created by states. Yet the administration has embraced a ruling by the Internal Revenue Service that allows the subsidies in the 34 exchanges run by the federal government. Does the Obama administration believe that Obamacare is the law of the land—or that the law of the land is whatever the Obama administration says it is? "

"Months after a federal appeals court reinstated a lawsuit seeking Central Intelligence Agency documents outlining the government’s drone targeted killing program, the President Barack Obama administration is again claiming that acknowledging if it has such paperwork could disclose classified secrets concerning whether it even carries out targeted killings. All the while, a federal appeals court ruled in March that everybody knows the government performs targeted killings. “The President of the United States has himself publicly acknowledged that the United States uses drone strikes against al-Qaeda,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had ruled."

"Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis doesn’t have faith in Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno. Or the rest of the U.S. Army’s generals, for that matter. Writing in the August issues of The Armed Forces Journal (“Purge the generals“), Davis argues that it’s high time to sack the Army’s senior leaders for what he sees as an institutionalized epidemic of astonishing failures that not only go unreported, but are typically rewarded. All of it, he says, is creating a self-perpetuating culture of abysmal performance that won’t go away until the generals do. “Over that past 20 years, our senior leaders have amassed a record of failure in major organizational, acquisition and strategic efforts,” Davis writes. “These failures have been accompanied by the hallmarks of an organization unable and unwilling to fix itself: aggressive resistance to the reporting of problems, suppression of failed test results, public declaration of success where none was justified, and the absence of accountability.”

"Davis isn’t alone in his criticism, and it’s not just the money. Others see a mediocre Army whose leaders seem insistent on creating a smaller combat force that is mismatched for the future of American operations. In May 2007, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, comparing the prospect of U.S. defeat in the cases of Vietnam and Iraq, wrote that the debacles in the Iraq war “are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America’s general officer corps,” who have “failed to prepare our armed forces for war.”"

"LOTS of news coverage today (BBC, Discovery, Wired, Livescience, Daily Mail, The Telegraph, io9) for some recent experiments conducted on euthanized rats, which appears to show a coherent "surge of synchronous gamma oscillations" that occurred in the first 30 seconds after cardiac arrest in the animals. According to the paper's authors, this data suggests "the mammalian brain can, albeit paradoxically, generate neural correlates of heightened conscious processing at near-death". In interviews with news outlets, they put this into layman's terms, noting how their data might be linked to the near-death experience: All the data, they said, "show the fingerprints of neural consciousness at near-death is at a much higher level compared to the waking state. That explains the realer-than-real human experience"."

"CBS Sports Network and IMG have reached a multi-year agreement to showcase the World’s Strongest Man competition on CBS Sports Network, as part of the Network’s CBS Sports Spectacular series. CBS Sports Network will air ten 30-minute episodes from the 2013 competition, culminating with a one-hour finale crowning the 2013 World’s Strongest Man."